Wednesday, August 31, 2005

The polls have opened for overseas voters. So if you're a Kiwi reading this from overseas, and you're on the electoral roll, then you can now vote. You can do it from an internet cafe - its as simple as printing off a ballot paper and posting or faxing it in. Full details (including the finickity rules about eligibility) here.

7
comments:

Thanks for the info - I'd pretty much written off voting since I got a message saying I was welcome to go and vote at the embassy in Riyadh.

I'm up for grabs here, left-wing parties! Should I vote Green despite their anti-science new age hippyness, or Alliance despite their almost certainly having no chance of making the threshold?
Posted by
Psycho Milt
:
8/31/2005 10:56:00 PM

That depends on the value you place on having your vote actually count. In the Greens' favour, they'll actually get into Parliament, and their social policies are solidly left. I expect their anti-science new age hippyness to be restrained by their coalition partners; the moratorium on general release will probably continue, but they won't be running GE scientists out of their labs or cutting funding from FORST. In the Alliance's favour, they're solidly left, and they need the support. Every vote for them is a message telling them to stay in the game rather than quit. Even out of Parliament, they can advocate for the left, but they need a reason to keep doing it rather than just give up and go back to their day jobs. And who knows? Maybe they'll somehow get some media coverage and manage to do a Dunne...
Posted by
Idiot/Savant
:
9/01/2005 12:12:00 AM

Even if you dispute opposition to GE on scientific grounds, it makes economic sense to keep NZ GE free for the time being. Depending on your electorate, a vote for an Alliance candidate may be the best practical option (do overseas voters get electorate votes?); in most cases voting for a major party candidate will have no effect at all on the composition of parliament.
Posted by
Commie Mutant Traitor
:
9/01/2005 03:09:00 PM

CMT: Yes, overseas voters get electorate votes - in the electorate they last lived in. But given the large concentration of eligible expats in Sydney, it almost makes sense to have an electorate over there to cater to them (yeah, and to piss off the Aussies :)
Posted by
Idiot/Savant
:
9/01/2005 04:24:00 PM